Montreal shows off new plan for Bridge-Bonaventure featuring dense, off-market housing

Bridge-Bonaventure, the neighbourhood on the banks of the St. Lawrence River in Montreal's Sud-Ouest borough, will be a densely populated area featuring large residential towers filled with off-market housing. 

That's the new vision for the area that Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante presented on Monday.

The plan features "up to" 13,500 housing units — more than double what the city had previously earmarked for the sector. 

"We will make this an exemplary neighbourhood that includes an employment hub, affordable housing and green spaces linked to the river, just a stone's throw from downtown," said Plante. 

But the city wants at least 40 per cent of those new housing units to be off-market. Off-market housing could be either affordable units, which are rental units intended to be offered at or below market rates, or social housing units, which are managed by the city and where tenants pay rent decided by a percentage of their income. 

Plante did not say how much of the off-market housing would be devoted to social or affordable units. 

Bridge-Bonaventure is an approximately 2.3 square kilometre area between the Lachine Canal, the Old Port and the St. Lawrence River. Some of the land in the neighbourhood, including Silo No. 5 — a large abandoned silo structure visible from the Old Port — is owned by the Canada Lands Company, a Crown corporation. 

Stéphan Déry, the president of the Canada Lands Company, accompanied Plante at a Monday morning press conference to promote the city's new plan for the neighbourhood. 

He said the Canada Lands Company will develop the land it owns in the area into a "dynamic and inclusive place." The city's plan includes developing the Peel Basin into a housing hub that includes a beach with swimming access. 

The city has long considered Bridge-Bonaventure a neighbourhood ripe for development, but developers and community activists have presented at times duelling visions of how the area should be built up.

During public consultations in 2018, residents who live near the area had raised concerns about the sector becoming "another Griffintown." 

Some residents complain that Griffintown, a dense collection of residential buildings just north of Bridge-Bonaventure, lacks greenspace and public infrastructure, including a school and a health centre. 

Plante's vision for the neighbourhood includes 43 hectares of green space and 600,000 square metres set aside for businesses and institutions like schools. 

She also said the city intends to make sure it is connected to the public transit networks, and features bike infrastructure and other elements that will make it a "complete neighbourhood." 

Some developers have said the city's initial plans for the neighbourhood, which featured lower-rise housing and less density, would be unprofitable. Building in the area is likely to be expensive because much of the land is former industrial territory that needs to be decontaminated. 

The city says the new, higher-density plan for the area will ensure developers invest there, even if they will be required to build a higher proportion of social housing. 

Francis Dolan, a community organizer with Regroupement information logement de Pointe-Saint-Charles, a housing rights group, said he was happy to see the city including large percentages of off-market housing in their plan. 

He said the housing crisis was hitting the neighbourhood particularly hard. Two-bedroom apartments are being put up for rent for as much as $2,500. 

"Here in the Sud-Ouest, we are in a big housing crisis. Every new project made by the private market are really out of price," he said. 

He hoped thousands of new off-market units could help more people find a home they can afford. 

But Catherine Lussier, the coordinator of the housing rights group FRAPRU, said even those new units will not be enough to give a social housing unit to everyone who needs one.

She said she had wanted all the units built on the public land in the Bridge-Bonaventure sector to be off-market.

"Considering it's on public land we would expect those lands to be 100 per cent reserved for social housing," she said. "They are public. They should stay public."